Butterflies and bearskins
It was Simon that suggested they make the house their own, two months after Aunt Helen died. She had by then been living in a ‘home’ for seven years — not once did she fail to voice those inverted commas when referring to it as such, although she didn’t resent it. It agonized Julia to think of her there, but she knew she couldn’t give her the care she needed; and Aunt Helen had been furious at the very suggestion that she should spend the first years of her marriage looking after an old woman. In her clean, sunny, bland little room, she turned the pages of Edward’s diary peaceably, laughing out loud sometimes or sharing some particularly gruesome detail with nurses, doctors, fellow inmates, the empty room. She had meant to find a publisher for it, to make sense of the last fading pages and present his tale to the world, restored and whole; but she somehow ran out of time. She knew the story by heart, which was just as well as she could no longer hold one sentence in her head for long enough to connect it to the next. When Julia visited, they would exchange tales of the ice as if the memories were their own. Simon remembers now the vivid recollections that they span together as he took a seat at the edge of the room, listening, remote from them as if watching through a window while they played in the snow. She died on a high-summer’s day not unlike this one, last year; Julia and the nurse on duty found her in her chair by the window, napping, it seemed, in the peace of the bright afternoon, her skin warmed on the surface by the sun but her blood quite cool.
Come October, autumn was giving way to a drizzling winter and dark afternoons. The will was settled, the grieving ostensibly over, the house empty for too long and full of the family’s things, waiting to be cleared.
Simon came home a little later than usual one day to find Julia in the bath. She looked up and slightly past him and smiled, when he came into the tiny bathroom — she had left the door open. He hesitated over his intrusion, then knelt beside her, not quite sure of her or himself or desire, but when his hand bent to cup the water over her skin, he found it was cold; not just tepid, but freezing as a northern sea.
‘How long have you been sitting here?’ he asked, very casually, feeling it was important to betray no alarm or haul her out and wrap her in something warm or hold her, although these things, too, he felt were important things he should do.
‘Not long. I don’t know. What time is it? Half an hour, I think.’
Simon checked his watch. He had come in the door at 7.43; he remembered glancing at his watch. He reckoned perhaps six or seven minutes had passed. Nevertheless, he checked again and could not help but indulge for a moment the pleasure of his correct estimate.
‘It’s almost eight’ — 7.49 — ‘Julia… the water…’ How to address this? ‘Isn’t the water a bit cold? Are you sure you’ve only been here half an hour?’
Simon imagined her leaving work early again, without telling her colleagues (and how long could they continue to indulge her? How long is one allowed to grieve?). She would have arrived at home, run a bath, left a pile of clothes on the floor and climbed in, hours contracting as the water cooled and Julia blank as the surface of the water. But he put this vision from his mind
because it was surely the behaviour of a mad person, or a person who is too unhappy to be reached.
‘Oh, yes. I know.’ She knew. Relief rinsed over him until he realized that this was not, in itself, an explanation.
‘There was no hot water left. So I just ran it cold.’
‘I see. Then you got in. It really is. Cold.’ Some silent minutes passed. In the flat above, a washing machine thumped through its spin cycle. When Simon thinks of the Balham flat now, of the years they spent there, he remembers the muffled constant banging of other domestic lives all around them, and he remembers also the bathroom window, the muck-streaked runnels of rain lit orange in the streetlight. All their life together compressed into a black square of ugly frosted glass, curtainless, letting the night in. A car horn blared in the street; somebody shouted, an engine snarled a threat. He perched on the side of the bath, staring into nothing.
It’s easy to be drawn to Julia and her beauty, her lightness, her vagueness. Just hearing her cat’s-tread upon the stair, we follow. But sitting on the side of his wife’s cold bath, Simon wondered if that elusive quiver he’d fallen for might elude him always. There is, after all, reality to contend with, as well as romance. Simon sometimes grows weary with unworldliness. He cannot always be the one to bear the world’s burdens alone.
Suddenly she shivered violently and crouched forward with a chilly splash that shocked Simon out of his daze, his sleeve soaked. She pulled her knees up like a child and hugged them and seeing the bones of her spine all down her narrow back he was touched almost unbearably; she had thinned to transparency, in the last months; all the gold was gone from her skin, she was as pale as blue-shadowed ice. He would have liked to cry for her the tears that
were dripping silently from her chin into the water. Then at last he lifted her, taking her elbow and raising her, guiding her, numb and pliable, from the bath, folding her in a towel and in his arms and letting her sob soundless on his shoulder.
Later, they sat with cups of tea in the sitting room, Julia wrapped in a blanket and occasionally convulsing from the cold left in the corners of her. And he remembered the year they met, the weekends at the old house. He remembered their first Christmas together there, with Aunt Helen and Julia’s sister and her husband and their first baby, feeling embarrassed and pleased to be part of their warmth. At Aunt Helen’s table, he had thought guiltily for a moment of his parents, spending Christmas alone together for the first time since he was born (he didn’t know it then, but it was also the last — the next March, a vessel burst in his father’s hard heart). He imagined them sitting opposite each other over a turkey far too big for the two of them, dried out in the oven by his mother’s caution. Then he thought, No, they won’t be opposite each other because they will sit where they always sit, my father will not relinquish the head of the table and will leave my place empty in recrimination and my mother will have to sit across from my absence and will not allow herself to consider what might have caused it. And instead of allowing his parents’ bitterness to twist into him across the distance, he looked to the head of the table where Aunt Helen had taken her place, brandishing carving fork and knife over a glistening goose and laughing. At that time she could laugh at her own oddness, she’d say something entirely out of place and then put her hand to her lips with a surprised giggle, as if someone else had used her mouth to say it.
He did his best to relax. He wore his paper hat, and forgot after a while the hot itch of it.
Sitting in a flat in Balham on a wet, dull night almost a decade later, he imagined a family of his own in that house. He thought of the bear rug in front of the open fire, of laying Julia down upon it again, as he had years before. How much warmer, wider, easier life would be, away from London, away from the dirt and the shouts in the street. How much happier she might be, in the house where the first days of their love affair — as tentative, gentle and delicate as any Victorian courtship — were played out. In the house where he first lay beside her…
Circling and circling, his mind returns to it. Among the clutter that catches at his thoughts in hints and snatches, Julia lies resplendent on the bearskin like a vivid half-forgotten dream. Is it possible to know her? Even what is past is not constant. Countless versions of her coalesce, flicker, disperse. She is lost moments and habits too familiar to recall and a turn of the head one Tuesday afternoon; memories will fold and flutter and resettle themselves; no, a lover cannot be set and pinned. Still he pursues her always; still he does love her, he tells himself, whoever she is. There is more than one kind of love story.
Simon and Julia met because of the butterflies, on a warm spring day, ten years ago. In the very same room in which Dr Nansen lectured and Emily, seeing ambition blaze, set her sights on Edward; in that same room around a hundred years later, Simon gallantly gave up his handkerchief, and with it his heart, which Julia returned in a damp crumpled ball. He washed the handkerchief when he got home, but his heart never quite recovered.
Julia, too, a damp crumpled ball, and summoning a helpless smile; her head
on his chest, which was later; the bearskin… We will come to all this in time. For now: they met because of the butterflies. He came to see the collection. When Aunt Helen was alive, the house functioned as a sort of ad hoc museum, much of its contents untouched since Emily Mackley returned alone from her honeymoon at the turn of the century to wait sixty years to die. Her husband was everywhere; his brother John had adorned the safe, solid walls of his home with the spoils of vicarious adventure. Aunt Helen somehow, through the mysterious channels of communication that formed the fine silver network of her world, let it be known that visitors were welcome. In her heyday, the house had been open to all comers — friends, artists, admirers, lovers, serious historians, dilettantes and dabblers. Simon was one of the last. He had come to see… When the door opened, he found himself helplessly pinned by pale brown eyes and a smile that went off to one side as if distracted. He made no move; behind her in the dim hallway, a polar bear was ready to pounce. It had not yet retreated to the top of the house.
Julia introduced herself and invited him in, happy enough with the explanation that he was Simon and had come to see the butterflies. Browsing a specialist journal that he subscribed to, he had caught sight of a poor and greyed photographic reproduction of a mounted series which, nevertheless, his curiosity snagged upon; there, in the far north, these creatures thrived in the bright, cold summer. He noticed the photo credit — ‘Gift of Lieutenant S. Freely, Mackley Family private collection’ and the name of a town not so far from London. He had heard of neither the benefactor nor the Mackleys, but when called for a consultation a few months later — the streets of this town are all subsiding grandeur — he remembered the name of the place, sought out the Mackley address and took the opportunity to pay a visit. A few months later
and he might have forgotten; so coincidence shapes us (or fate if you prefer, but Simon, a rationalist, does not). He had written two weeks before to ask if he might see just this one of their treasures, and received a prompt response from a Miss Helen Mackley — it happened that her niece would be visiting that day and they would both be pleased to see him and show him whatever took his interest.
Was there, even then, some presentiment on Aunt Helen’s part, which lit the spark in her matchmaker’s eye? Fanciful, perhaps, the imagined flash just a reflection in the light of what came after; but a man who would go out of his way to see a host of white butterflies, and who still took the time to write letters by hand — such a man might well be deemed worth a try.
Whatever the case may be, Simon, who had asked to see this single artefact, found when the door was answered by a gilded young woman in a faded summer dress that he somehow could not bring himself to cut short what was evidently the customary tour. He trailed behind her, this Julia, the youngest of the Mackleys, trying not to bump into things as she showed him the snowshoes and the skis on the wall, the diary, the portraits, the china, the decanter, the photographs, and back to the hallway for everyone’s favourites, the big and little polar bears. ‘These are everyone’s favourites,’ she said, giving no hint of her own preference one way or the other, and Simon, twenty-five and fumbling, heard himself say surprisingly, ‘Are they yours?’ At that moment Aunt Helen clipped into the room wielding secateurs with a flurry of pleasure and remonstration: Julia should have told her their guest had arrived, she had just been out in the garden, she had just been… the roses… would he like some tea? Wouldn’t Julia make some tea for them? Hesitant, her niece obliged, and returned five minutes later to find Simon in the drawing room politely
bewildered as Aunt Helen, miming snow-blindness, modelled a pair of goggles from 1893. Embarrassed, Julia laughed, and then Aunt Helen did too and poor Simon blushed all up his neck.
‘Oh, what a silly old woman. What I must look like to you, Jonathan, like a lunatic.’
‘It’s Simon, Aunt Helen.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Simon. Our guest. Jonathan is still in America.’ She turned to Simon. ‘My cousin. She gets names mixed up.’
‘Don’t we all?’ said Simon kindly.
‘One of those families where there’s only two names for boys going round. It’s hardly surprising really.’
While dark, gaunt Simon, as we have noted, could well be mistaken for a Mackley, in fact it would be hard to confuse him with Julia’s cousin, who inherited the less fortunate looks of their Great-grandmother Arabella. As it happens, at this moment Jonathan is mopping his wide brow, as flushed as the red hair above it, in a business meeting not very far from Simon in the city; thinking of the garden in the sun, he remembers he must buy cigars… but he will arrive later in the day, soon enough.
On that afternoon ten years ago, Aunt Helen had removed the goggles and was pouring tea into a cup; and then there was a quiet thud and she was staring at the cup on the floor and the tea spilled out over the carpet, and for a while she kept pouring into the growing stain. Julia took the pot from her gently, not feeling the burn on her hands. Everything seemed to be happening very
sedately, without panic or exclamation, thought Simon, feeling strangely detached until he found himself leaping up and offering to fetch a towel.
‘Oh, please don’t worry.’
‘What a silly old woman,’ said Aunt Helen again, but she sounded unsure this time, there was a quaver in her voice and when she looked up, she looked lost. She focused on Julia. ‘It just slipped out of my hand, Maggie.’